For the last 20 years, Dulcian has been solving complex problems for large organizations. Our first projects were in the healthcare industry and we have been working on various complex systems throughout Dulcian’s history.
We are now focusing even more on supporting and finding new solutions for healthcare. The healthcare industry needs better IT systems. Since the US government insisted that doctors and hospitals adopt Electronic Health Records (EHR), many of the tools that have been developed are expensive and hard to use and implement. Although individuals may have access to much of their financial and other data, their access to their healthcare data is often very limited. Pharmacies are making progress providing access, as are testing laboratories, but most doctors and hospitals are still struggling to provide adequate electronic access to patients’ records.
I went on a crusade to figure out how we can help. I became involved with Healthcare Information Management Systems (HIMSS) and was a member of the board for the Society for Participatory Medicine (SPM). I also introduced Dulcian to the Health 2.0 folks.
Over the last two years, Dulcian has worked with Athenahealth and Epion Health to build an iPad check-in application for patients in physician’s offices. It was a fun project with lots of challenges and we learned a lot. The Athenahealth MDP team is doing an outstanding job liberating the data so that IT companies can give patients and physicians better access to their healthcare data.
With this project behind us, we’re trying to find ways to ease the burden on physicians. We have come up with a way to make it much easier for physicians’ office staff to log time spent on chronic care. As we work on ways to facilitate this process, we will share our struggles and successes in the hope that together, we can make it easier to share and use healthcare data for everyone’s benefit.
We don’t want to stop there, we want to give patients full access to their data and provide tools for physicians to provide excellent care. Join us on this journey:
– Paul Dorsey will continue sharing his vision for new products and services and will lend a (constructively) critical eye to both the IT and Healthcare industries.
– Flora Davidson will share insights on the Federal Regulations relating to healthcare.
– I (Ileana Balcu) will continue to champion the interests of patients (all of us, eventually) and keep cheering on the patients who want access to their own data. I will also share Dulcian’s experiences with the Athenahealth API interfaces.
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